It is true that social media can be beneficial to a business, but it can also cause a migraine at the same time. If not implemented properly it can damage your business’ reputation or become a waste of time. Here are some important steps to keep in mind when developing a social media content strategy. This will help keep your content relevant and work to amplify your postings. Some steps to include are brainstorming, research, and determining which platforms to use.

Brainstorming

First, let’s start off with brainstorming potential content ideas. These will help build shareable content. In this stage it is important to think broadly about your industry. It is necessary to think about how you can branch out to reach a wider audience. It is a good idea to not have a narrow view of your business when brainstorming content topics at first. Once you build out a variety of topics and ideas you can always go back and decide what fits your brand image. Try to think of all the components that work together to make up your business. For example, let’s say I own a skateboard shop. I might produce content about skateboard maintenance or the benefits of skateboarding. This tactic will help you build a diverse social media content strategy.

Here is a visual representation of my thought process when brainstorming content:

Research

Once you have spent time brainstorming, then it’s time to move on to the next phase, research. We want to learn what types of content are performing well in our industry.

In continuing on with our skateboarding example, let’s say I am done brainstorming. Now I have some topics I want to build out content around. It’s time to dive into some content research so I have a better idea of what performs well. This will vary by industry and whether you’re a B2B or B2C business.

When conducting my research, I use several tools to learn what is performing well. For this, I am going to start with a neat and free tool called Epicbeat, which I think is an appropriate name for a social media tool. Epicbeat will help you discover popular content, influencers, and industry insights.

First, I want to enter in the term I will be researching.

Then, I am directed to a dashboard that gives a quick view of several key factors. These factors will help me find content to re-share and give me greater insight into what I need to create.

Which Platforms?

The few things I want to get insight into are which platforms are popular and what types of content perform best. Then, I want to know when I should be posting to my platforms.

Right away I see that Facebook is the most popular channel followed by Vine and Instagram. I also get some other metrics such as average shares per post and a few other engagement metrics which is great. This tells me the type of engagement I can expect from each social platform. I also want to look for what type of content is most popular within this industry.

Now from my research, I know I should focus on Facebook and maybe Instagram as well. This will help get my social media content strategy off to a great start. After reviewing the engagement metrics, I know where I need to be to have an impact. Keep in mind, it is important to start a social media campaign small and scale up. In most cases, it is better to have one or two social profiles than five that you rarely engage with users on.

EpicBeat is nice enough to give me the distribution by content type for skateboarding. This gives me a better idea of the types of content to either begin producing or re-sharing. Right away I see that ‘how’ articles are trending with Listicles, and Interviews trailing. If I skipped this step and ran giveaways and produced guides, I would have missed a lot of engagement. This is why research is so crucial so you are not fumbling around in the dark.

I’m at a great starting point now I have my topics I want to build content around. I also have a better idea of which social platforms my target audience are active on. Now I have a better understanding of the content types I will begin curating. I even have an idea of what I can re-share to my platforms to further encourage engagement too.

Tools make research easier, but you should still browse followers to gain more insight. Look for what they are sharing and engaging with, and news they consider important. This will help you plan your social media content strategy in an effective manner. As an added bonus, I like to use Klout to spot trending content pieces and re-share them with my followers. Only use this platform once you have taken the time to research your industry and build out topics. This can be a great way to find relevant news about your industry.

Klout shows content to reflect the best trending pieces related to your industry. Klout also includes a search function as well so you can do further research. This allows me to take topics I built out earlier and search for trending articles. Another feature like EpicBeat is the ability to find influencers within your niche. You can even research influencers within your industry and see content they engage with.

Once inside the platform, there is no need to go back and forth between Hootsuite to schedule a post. You can schedule all your content within the platform as well and save some time. Remember, research is the cornerstone of a successful social media content strategy. Taking the time to brainstorm will lead to unique ideas that may not have developed otherwise.

As a side note, you can have a great social media content strategy but without goals you can get off track. Setting goals that impact your business is important when starting a social media campaign.

By brainstorming, researching, and evaluating platforms, you can start an effective social media campaign.

Social Media can be a valuable tool to connect with customers and develop brand awareness along with relationships. Unfortunately, it can at times be a difficult and daunting task that can very easily become overwhelming. Thanks to the ever-growing list of social media platforms, it can be hard to know where to begin your social media campaign. Fortunately, Beacon has you covered with some social media best practices to help you get the most out of your campaigns. To begin a campaign, it is important to start by investing the time to do research into your target market, consistently sharing content, leveraging technology to amplify your content, and setting specific and measurable goals. This way you can be sure to get your social campaign started off on the right foot.

Research is important for your social campaign for a number of reasons.

First, it’s important to know what types of content people are sharing and engaging with within your industry. A good start is to analyze your competitors’ social platforms and see what’s working for them along with what platforms they are active on.

*Courtesy of member clicks

In addition to understanding what social media platforms your competition are active on, it’s important to know what types of content perform well for your industry. A good tool for this is can be found at Buzz sumo.. This tool will allow you to search based on topics or by specific domains to see what types of content perform well and what is being shared. You can also easily share content from this platform directly to your social media accounts.

Second, once you know which platforms your target audience are active on, it’s time to do some hashtag research so you can amplify your content and posts. No, I’m not talking #about #spamming #posts with #hashtags but using them cautiously to boost your reach on social media. Some social media best practices when it comes to hashtags is to keep it relevant and never spam them. Also, Hashtagify.me has a good tool that suggests relevant hashtags based on the topic you type in their search box. This is a great starting point if you are drawing a blank.

Once you identify potential #hashtags you are interested in using, now you need to understand what sort of reach and impact they will have when trying to amplify your content. You can take the #hashtags that hashtagify.me recommends and put them in Google Trends. Google trends will show you the interest of these topics over time and it should give you a rough estimate of the impact these hashtags can have on amplifying your content.

Consistency is key when stepping into the social media realm.

It is important when deciding to start a social media campaign to keep a consistent brand image across all platforms. Each social media platform you use for your business will have a different layout but make sure items such as your profile image and company bio are consistent. A good point of reference is to design your social media profiles to reflect your company’s website where appropriate. It can get confusing and disorient your audience if your social media profiles are a mashup of random conflicting social bios with pixelated distorted profile images.

The next step in being consistent is regularly developing content and a content schedule. This way your business or company’s social media profile will not fall into the abyss and be forgotten. Mapping out a content schedule has several social media benefits:

Mapping out Time Sensitive Content– Your social media content schedule will anticipate company events, holidays, birthdays, contests and will allow you to be creative with regards to how you develop and curate the content. This will also reduce stress while keeping your engagement rates up.

Involve Others– Scheduling content in advance allows other members of your team to become involved in the content curation as opposed to just one person.

Enforce the 80-10-10 rule– The majority of content you create should be informative (think 80%), interesting and relevant to your audience. 15-10% of your content should be re-tweets, or sharing content curated by other people, that your audience would find interesting. Roughly 10%-5% or so should be about promoting specific products or services your business offers. Remember that your social media platforms are not for actively making sales. The goal is to build relationships first and provide relevant engaging content. If you selfishly promote too much and neglect to share content from others, this can lead to potential customers unfollowing you on your social platforms. For some great tips on how to use social media for small business be sure to read “I Tweet, But No One Buys“.

A wonderful tool to help with consistency and take away some stress associated with social media is Hootsuite. Thankfully, it is free for the first few accounts and lets you schedule all your social media posts out for several weeks or months in advance. You can sync most of your social media accounts all under one roof. Hootsuite also allows you to monitor what others are saying about your brand and provides opportunities to engage with your audience.

Finally, it is important to create an overall objective, specific goals, and set key performance indicators.

This will help you track your success with your social media campaign and make adjustments as necessary along the way. Your overall objective should be qualitative, ambitious and certainly achievable through social media. An example can be “We strive to be the authority on social for *lawn care services*.” Moving forward, we need to set some goals to accomplish our objective. Some examples of strategic social goals to take into consideration are increasing reach, increasing website conversions, increasing retention, establishing credibility within our niche, and increasing web visibility.

These are good starting points, but it is important to dig a little deeper and discover what would positively impact your business and is it possible to accomplish through social media. Some sample goals can include:

Building and fostering a social community– Growing a strong social media following is essential to any successful social campaign, without a community you have nothing. This can be accomplished by sharing relevant and anticipated content with your followers and encouraging engagement across platforms.

Drive conversions with social media– A great reason for using social media marketing is to ultimately assist with conversion efforts. It is not so useful for engaging in selling, but it is best suited to assist customers through your sales funnel.

Build brand awareness– Possibly the most important goal of any social media campaign is to increase awareness of your brand and get consumers talking about your company. Fortunately, it is easy to track, measure and follow up with what people are saying about your brand while making adjustments as you go.

Then moving forward, establish certain key performance indicators or (KPI’s) that you can use to keep you on track with your overall objective. If you are not actively measuring your efforts on social media, it becomes hard to know what sort of impact it is having on your business. This may have your boss and managers wondering if social media is a waste of time. Some sample performance indicators you can use to measure the impact of your campaign can be:

Reach

This can easily be measured by how many followers your accounts have accumulated. These are the people who are being exposed to your posts and brand. While it is great to gain a large following and have a large community throughout your social media platforms it is important to consider the demographics of your followers as well and if they are part of your target market. More followers doesn’t always = equal success in social media.

Engagement

Sure, accumulating fans, followers, and a community is wonderful but if they are not actively engaging with your content then you have a problem. Here are some metrics to track and analyze when running a social campaign. For a more in depth look be sure to read a previous blog that goes more into more detail with measuring important social media metrics.

Likes & Favorite’s are the very first level of engagement when it comes to social media. While this is a positive engagement metric it is a very low metric and does not usually mean a person has read through your post or visited your site as a result. However, they are a good indication of a campaign slowly gaining traction.

Shares & Retweet’s allow your social posts to be amplified and reach a larger audience quickly. This is also an excellent indication of what types of content and posts your audience are interested in seeing. You can track shares and retweets and work with your team to curate more content that has a better opportunity of gaining greater traction within your audience.

Remember, when building social media campaigns, research your potential target market, leverage technology, then set ambitious and achievable goals that are measurable.

I’m sure by now most of you have seen, clicked, heard about and even hidden clickbait articles from your social feeds, emails and search results. The prevalence of articles that use emotion, sex, animals, quizzes and worst of all, tragedy, to get clicks has prompted search engines and social networks to crack down and even penalize these content providers.

Find Out Which Historical Figure You Are…

Copywriters have been using catchy headlines or intriguing headline copy to draw in audiences from as early as the 19th century. Not coined ‘click-bait’ in the 1800s, newspapers and editors utilized what was called ‘yellow journalism’ to bait readers into buying papers and increasing circulation. Early clickbait came in the form of cartoons featuring the ‘Yellow Kid’ by Joseph Pulitzer’s, New York World, which was winning the read-bait battle against rival owner, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. What is shocking is that these tycoons are remembered today as pioneers and visionaries for taking part in what was back then, yellow journalism. More recent examples include Vinnie Musetto, a former editor at the New York Post who wrote the famous headline “Headless Body In Topless Bar.” He is affectionately called the godfather of click-bait as old New York Post front pages resembled very closely today’s Buzzfeed or UpWorthy, with catchy and cheeky headlines stacked one on top of another.

What is scarier still, is that in half a century we may look back in the history books at the creators of UpWorthy or Buzzfeed with admiration and as pioneers in the field of online journalism. Imagine journalism students learning the basic s by using the ‘Distractify Principle’ or the ‘Viralnova Theory’ in future classrooms where the Internet has swelled to an-ever bloated capacity that the need to go viral outweighs the need for truth in journalism. All this to say that clickbait is nothing new, but more annoying and distracting as ever when more and more people use social media and news-aggregator sites to stay informed.

Why Does ClickBait Work? You Gotta See This!

The Oxford English Dictionary defines clickbait: “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.” That definition doesn’t seem harmful or convey the emotion most people experience when they see these headlines. Most of us feel guilty within a fraction of a second of clicking one of these articles in our Facebook feed. We get this dirty feeling that we fell prey to some trap that a caveman should instinctively know to avoid. So why do we keep doing it? Why do we click an article to find out which Disney character defines us based on 10 meaningless questions? Why do we go down a YouTube rabbit hole to watch bloopers for every season of every television program on CBS? Why do I read wiki articles and forum articles on Lord of the Rings (nerd flag rising…) until 1:00 a.m. in the morning so I can better understand the difference between the Vanyar, Noldor and Teleri elves? As my wife would say, “Not to get a girlfriend.”

The reason we all fall prey to suggested YouTube clips, Facebook articles shared by your aunt or quizzes that your annoying co-worker sends you are because of something called the ‘curiosity gap.’ The curiosity gap is the principle that articles, headlines or thumbnails show just enough information to get you interested in taking action, but not enough information to help you fully understand what the piece is about. This is why YouTube creators use thumbnails of attractive women that don’t even make a cameo in the video you just clicked. This is the reason you click on an article to find out “Why You Should Never Shop At Grocery Stores Again” or “These 8 Celebrities Had WHAT Job Before They Got Famous?” instead of spending time with your child who is next to you reading “10 Time Justin Bieber Proved He’s The Real Prince Charming.” The curiosity gap helps to show us how we all are becoming compulsive clickers, clicking from one un-informative article to the next without considering the consequences. In a world of abundant and never-ending information at our fingertips, American’s attention spans have dropped from 12 to 8 seconds in just a decade. With the amount of emails and websites read every day, getting a message through to anyone is becoming an impossible task.

This Paragraph Will Change Your Mind About Click Bait In Just One Sentence

Clickbait is a great quick-win for traffic but a terrible lose-lose strategy for retaining readers/viewers and staying relevant in a saturated Internet. (This was the sentence I was referencing. Not to say the one immediately following this one isn’t bad, but…yeah) Here is the trouble with clickbait; Print and online media’s job is to express, educate, persuade and entertain. Most articles that fall under the definition of clickbait do not complete the job of any of the aforementioned purposes of the media. Sadly, the most interesting thing about the clickbait article is the headline itself. This is why we are beginning to see a revolt against clickbait. Late last year Facebook began cracking down on clickbait by penalizing content sources that don’t hold readers attention. If a reader clicks on an article and within seconds returns to Facebook, this suggest they didn’t find what they wanted and the article is not useful. Facebook realizes the power it has with brands and brand publishers who strive to have relationships with readers/consumers by posting engaging news, photos and articles that get users to click and stay on their website for a lengthy period of time. These brands spend money with Facebook, they advertise within the NewsFeed and these clickbait sites are clouding the message. This is the reason for the options to now hide “posts like these” or “posts from this page” from your own news feed.

This trend isn’t limited to just Facebook. Google has also joined the queue. Google launched a phantom update earlier this year that largely impacted sites that employ how-to content such as HubPages or Answers.com. Some of these sites saw an almost 25% drop in search traffic in one week. The algorithm isn’t only limited to how-to content. Similar sites with thin content targeted by an earlier Panda update also were targeted. This was true for sites with clickbait articles, an abundance supplementary information, pages of stacked videos, and content that was difficult to navigate. These types of updates from Google will keep coming as well. With more and more clickbait articles showing up in Google News, users are complaining by the thousands and Google is responding in ruthless fashion by penalizing whole sites for thin content on even a small percentage of a site’s pages. This begs the need for better written content Internet-wide and a chance to re-evaluate search engine optimization’s role in getting clicks without the bait.

Improve Your SEO Without Clickbait…In 60 Seconds Or Less

(Unless it takes you longer to read. And in that case this anecdote isn’t helping your case)

Brands, marketers and small business can all write content that will be read, shared and help improve SEO. Even using catchy headlines that peak interest can be effective. The difference between a catchy headline in a well-written article and a clickbait article is the content itself. Some of the most successful blogs that Beacon writes are purely informational. They provide resources, analysis and engaging content that readers use, share and bookmark so they can come back later and consume more. Clickbait articles make you feel hollow inside and even though they get millions of views, don’t keep users on the site for longer than a minute. The likelihood of someone returning to your site again goes up dramatically when you keep them on your page for over 3 minutes. The other key difference is that when we feel cheated by a thinly-written clickbait article is that we don’t share it with others or start a conversation. Most news organization’s sites most-viewed articles concern hard-hitting content about war, race, politics, religion or social issues that can span 3-4 pages. They don’t make for catchy titles but they start a conversation, and in some cases a revolution.

Google and Bing pay attention to good content. Almost every algorithm in the past two years has been focused on content. The content cannot be thin, misleading or irrelevant enough from your title or you will be penalized. When it comes to writing content for your website, blog or social media, focus on creating content that expresses and idea, that educates the masses, persuades the reader to your side or to your products and entertains with quick-wit, wonderful photos and video content. On social outlets be clear with your hyperlinks where you are sending people, make your titles and descriptions enhance the content and see your engagement soar. Don’t write with the intent on stuffing keywords in every sentence, to copy every page and change content slightly to double your exposure or get into black-hat or grey-hat search engine optimization. Write with the passion a journalist does with engaging and informative headings, meaty paragraphs and visuals that do more to reinforce the text than get a click. The end result of well-written, deeply-researched and engaging content is the start of a relationship with a potential consumer. That consumer now has buy-in and will come back for more, will share content to their friends and followers and help increase traffic the right way…Instead of making illiteracy seem like a preferred option.

Jordan is a Digital Marketing Strategist at Beacon. He has a B.S. in in Communication (Broadcasting & Advertising) from Appalachian State University. Jordan specializes in search engine optimization strategies, social media marketing and analytics to help businesses drive more online traffic. When out of the office, you can find Jordan running, cycling or scaling a mountain. Along with trolling the internet for the next big thing, he is an avid movie viewer and bibliophile.

Is your company using Social Media? If not, this post is for you! Here at Beacon, we encounter many new clients who aren’t on Social Media and really don’t understand the importance of it. Since we hear the same questions over and over, I decided to pair up with Liz aka Beacon’s Social Media Guru and get her response to those questions.

Client Question 1: Why is Social Media important for my business?

Liz’s Answer – This question could be an entire blog post on its own. There are so many reasons why using social media is truly essential to your business! I’ll keep it simple with my top four reasons you need to be using social media:

SEO. I cannot stress this enough. Social media platforms are treated by Google just like any other webpage. Social activity (such as Google+ posts) will appear in SERPs and will allow you to capture real estate that otherwise would have been forfeited to a competitor. Social signals are sent to Google to help determine what pages are being served up in search results. Social media is giving your business the authority Google looks for when ranking pages. I could go on and on (and on…) about how social media benefits SEO- but we don’t have all day.

Traffic. When executed properly, social media drives qualified traffic to your website. More qualified traffic = more leads = more business! It’s as simple as that.

Brand exposure & marketing. Think of each social media profile as a mini marketing machine. The look and feel of your pages should be consistent with your brand’s image. By using social media you’re getting your name and message out there on a broader scale.

Engagement & relationships. Social media allows you to give your brand a personality and connect with your customers in a different way. It opens up a channel of communication that doesn’t exist in traditional marketing, and allows you to engage in back and forth public discussions with your customers. It also gives you a place to showcase your customer relationship management skills publicly.

Client Question 2:If I decided to add my business to a social media site, how do I know which one to add it too?

Liz’s Answer – A lot of our clients struggle with this decision. Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Vine, and so many others, it’s hard to know where you should be. More is not better in this case. Social media can be time consuming, and you don’t want to suck all of your resources dry trying to keep up with 10 different social profiles. Choosing social platforms that are a good fit should start with a look at your business. What type of goods or services do you offer and what is your business model? Look at your customer demographic for answers as well. If you’re a wholesale distributor of tires, you might not find Pinterest or Instagram to be a good fit. If you’re a jewelry company, LinkedIn might not be the best use of your time. Find out what types of users are on the platforms you’re interested in and compare them to your business. My recommendation is always to start off small and grow. It’s better to have two robust social media profiles then 10 dismal ones.

Client Question 3: What should I be posting about on Social Media?

Liz’s Answer – Generally speaking, there are two main categories of posts you should be using: engagement and promotion. Engagement posts are meant to drive conversations with your audience. Ask questions, share photos, tell jokes, relay news, etc. Getting your users engaged with you is the first step. Promotional posts are exactly that- self promotion for your business. Once you have your users engaged and interested in your page, you have the opportunity to advertise in front of them. Do not overdo it! You don’t want to bombard your users with sales pitch after sales pitch. There is no magic number to how many of each you should be posting. Sharing good consistent content is key to keeping your users engaged.

Client Question 4: How will I know if what I’m doing on Social Media is working?

Liz’s Answer – Like any other marketing initiative, analyzing and optimizing is key for running successful social media campaigns. It’s important to track and measure certain performance indicators across each social platform. Read my blog about 5 basic metrics you should be tracking. Look for trends and places for opportunity. Give your social profiles ample time to grow before you decide whether or not to continue expanding. I usually recommend 6-8 months of regular activity before making a conclusive decision on a specific platform.

Client Question 5: What if people don’t leave comments, how can I get them to leave comments?

Liz’s Answer – Sometimes getting your users engaged can feel like an uphill battle. Don’t become discouraged if you’re not getting responses right away. Test different post types and verbiage to see what strikes with your audience. Adding in a call to action such as “Like if you agree!” or “Re-tweet if you’re shopping our sale” to the end of your post can often boost interaction. Time of day can be a huge factor in engagement as well. Your entire fan base won’t see every post you put out there, so pay attention to when your fans are online and when they are engaging with you. Most social platforms have some degree of analytics built in, where you can measure the engagement rate and total reach of your posts by the hour of the day and the day of the week. Check out this post on increasing social engagement.

Client Question 6: How do we keep people from leaving negative comments and how do we handle it if they do?

Liz’s Answer – Social media promotes a very public and direct dialogue between your business and your prospects or customers. Often times this can result in some negative feedback from an unhappy patron. When responding remember to be quick, be understanding, take the conversation out of public where possible and know when to walk away.

Time is of the essence when responding to an internet complaint. Acknowledge your customer’s problem as quickly as possible even if you do not have an immediate solution. Try to resolve the issue off of your social profile by asking the customer to contact you directly. A simple statement such as “Hi Mr. Unhappy. We’re so sorry you’ve had a negative experience with [name of company.] Our customer service department is looking into the issue. Can you please send us a private message and include the best way to contact you? Thank you for giving us the opportunity to make this right!” Usually this will allow you time to actively resolve the issue. However, there are some people that are just looking to cause trouble. Use the same approach, but if they continue to go on, politely exit the conversation. Here’s an example “We’re sorry you feel you were mislead by one of our sales representatives. Our customers are our number one priority and we assure you this was not the case. We hope you understand and choose to do business with us again. Have a great day Mr. Unhappy!”

Use negative feedback to publicly demonstrate your company’s exceptional customer service. Never try to ignore or delete a bad comment- it could anger your customer and cause them to lash out. Remember, people have a tendency to be a little more audacious online since they are not standing face to face with a company representative. I like to call this “hiding behind their keyboards.”

Client Question 7: How do I get people to like our page?

Liz’s Answer – Spread the word far and wide! The first step is to integrate all your social media profiles with each other. Share your YouTube link on Facebook, and vice versa. You can include links to other social pages on each profile. You also want to get your social badges installed and linked on your website. That way, all your site visitors will be able to quickly connect to you on their preferred social network. Include these badges on your email marketing campaigns and in your email signatures. Get your social information included on all of your direct mail and printed materials. Use your badges and social URLs on your business cards, your catalogs, your coupon, your fliers etc.

Once you have reached out to all your existing customers, you’ll want to look to start acquiring new fans. Sweepstakes, giveaways and contests are a great way to increase the virality of your page. Don’t worry- they don’t have to cost a lot of money! Small prizes or even simple recognition contests will do the trick!

I hope you found this Q&A useful. If there are any questions Liz and I did not address feel free to leave them in the comments below and we’ll answer them!

Background: Liz has been working in digital marketing for over four years, specializing in creating and executing custom social media campaigns for businesses. To find out more about Liz go here or connect with her on Google+.

Ashley has a BS in Business with a concentration in Marketing from UNCG. She considers herself a marketing maniac during the day and marvelous mom at night. When not working she enjoys spending time with her family and training horses.

Now that we have been practicing for some time, we are aware of good (and, bad) ways to employ social media. Opinions will vary about the “best of the best”. That is the beauty of the web, it always changes. From a book summary I read on social media, here are some of the best practices according to the author at this point in time. This is not an exhaustive, all inclusive list. The basics are covered and should align with your current techniques for using social media effectively.

There are multiple platforms* available for your content and they should be used relative to the target audience. Having likeable content is a fundamental criteria for success. Get your customer to listen to you and then….

Listen first, and never stop listening – You want to know what customers think. Ask and they will tell you. Next, the most important thing to do is listen. Closing the loop by acting on what your customers tell you will prove that you not only listened, but that you understand and can do something about it.

Define your target audience better than ever – There are many tools that allow you to focus on your true demographics for your product/service(s). Define them and determine what will make them “like” your content.

Think – and act – like your consumer – Remember, it’s about them, not you. Don’t sell them; instead, provide content that is of interest to them. Get them talking about topics of interest and find ways to integrate your wares into their lifestyle.

Invite your customers to be your first fans – Word of mouth (WOM) is key here. The more likes you get, the better your credibility. Be clear about your value proposition and define what is in it for them. Remember, there is no value-add if only your employees are interacting with your content.

Create true dialogue with, and between, your customers – Related to listening and being genuine. Get them talking about you to leverage the WOM effect. When your customers share tips and tricks with others, it proves they are engaged. It also saves you from providing customer support directly. Help guide the discussion by acknowledging comments – and, correct where needed.

Be Authentic – Get connected by demonstrating an interest in your customers. Personalize it by including your name.

Be honest and transparent – You can spot a phony a mile away. Your customers can too.

Integrate social media into the entire customer experience – Another fundamental for success and cannot be stressed enough. Make sure everyone who interacts with your customers has the same message and is aware of promotions and specials. Regardless of how they find you, it should be a consistent message. The last thing you want is a disconnect among channels and mismanaged expectations from your customers. If they are online, they can tell their network about you – the good and the bad.

Don’t sell! Just make it easy and compelling for customers to buy – They already found your content and are engaged. Don’t insult them with a bland sales pitch. State the (relative) value proposition clearly and make it easy to “Add to Cart”.

Having a dialogue with your customers is easy using a social media platform. I would add that you keep in mind how you want to be treated. After all, we all are consumers in the end.

Ashley has a BS in Business with a concentration in Marketing from UNCG. She considers herself a marketing maniac during the day and marvelous mom at night. When not working she enjoys spending time with her family and training horses.

Ever wonder how to find out what images have been “pinned” from your website onto Pinterest? Well I’ve got just what you need. I’m going to use a well known Furniture company called Bassett Furniture for my example.

Here is the url you need and for it to work for your site just replace bassettfurniture.com with your domain.

The image above is an example of some of the images that are pinned from bassettfurniture.com and you can see who has pinned them. I recommend that every company be checking to see what’s been pinned and what people are saying about the products. Not only can you get great marketing ideas from what people are saying but you also can comment on any negative posts so that people know you are aware of a problem and are trying to fix it.

Do you have a Pinterest account? What are somethings you love about Pinterest?

Ashley has a BS in Business with a concentration in Marketing from UNCG. She considers herself a marketing maniac during the day and marvelous mom at night. When not working she enjoys spending time with her family and training horses.

Eight weeks down, two more to go. The past two months have really gone by quickly. I spent some time today reflecting back and what all I have done and learned so far here at Beacon. I’ve learned a lot, but I realize that there is still a lot I don’t know. Since this week was the start of a new month, I spent a lot of time this week working on transitioning the accounts I was working on to other members of the WMS team. This involved some meeting time and talking about what I had been doing, what I planned to do, and what steps could come next. The other major thing I did this week was to compile monthly reports for the clients I had been covering. Like I mentioned a few weeks back, that’s not the most glamorous task but it’s really not so bad. I found it very rewarding to see growth in the clients I covered and to see things I had done start to show results.

The other big thing I did this week was to sit down and map out a final two week plan to help market Beacon itself. I’m excited to be getting into this since my background from undergrad is marketing. Some of the things I am going to be doing involve PPC campaigns, setting up various tracking measures, creating possible promotions, and a few other ideas. This will be fun.

On a side note, I have been doing a lot of work with social media for several clients as well as for Beacon, and the more involved I get, the more I learn. I’ve always been comfortable with Facebook, but I never really have had much exposure to outlets such as blogs, Twitter, and Foursquare. That has changed during my time at Beacon. I’ve learned how to utilize various outlets to accomplish different tasks. For instance, I’ve learned that using Twitter can be very valuable for interacting with customers and is a great tool for promotional contests. Another thing I learned is that Foursquare, which is a location based check-in service, is great for driving foot traffic into a business. The way that is done is by first setting a location for the business within Foursquare. Then you can set up options where special offers will pop up on someone’s cell phone if they are running the Foursquare app and they are within a specified geographical area of your business’s location.

The final thing I want to talk about relates to social media as well. The “new kid on the block” is Google+. I was able to get an invite to join Google+ today. For those who are unfamiliar with Google+, it basically is a social media outlet similar to Facebook. There are subtle differences between the two that I have observed, but overall it seems to be more or less the same. The concept is almost the same as Facebook, and the only real differences at the moment are that Google+ calls features by different names than they are called within Facebook. I’m not entirely sure if it’s something I’ll stay with but I’m willing to give it the “old college try.”